About this time Mr. Hunter was allowed to nominate Home as his assistant at St. George’s, and in 1792 Home undertook a further portion of his work, by delivering the surgical lectures, for which purpose he was intrusted with Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts. This enabled Mr. Hunter to give more time to the preparation of his great treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds, which, however, remained to be published by his executors in 1794. Death was about to claim him, and the immediate cause which led to his end was a dispute with his colleagues and the governors of St. George’s Hospital about pupils’ fees. In his treatment of pupils personally Hunter was always generous, especially when they showed ability and zeal. Thus he gave Carlisle a perpetual ticket to his lectures, having been much pleased with a preparation he brought for his acceptance, showing the internal ear very excellently. He would often also send valuable patients to young men starting in practice, and struggling with pecuniary difficulties. He never concealed from his pupils the hard work he had done to attain his position: “I’ve been here a great many years, and have worked hard too, and yet I don’t know the principles of the art,” he remarked to one. He did not, however, get on so well with his fellow-surgeons at the hospital. He so constantly insisted on the importance of studying physiology for the benefit of surgical practice, while they had been educated with little or no physiology, that his manner, as well as his pursuits, procured him the stigma of being an innovator and enthusiast. Early in 1792 one of his colleagues, Charles Hawkins, resigned the surgeoncy, and Keate, then assistant to Gunning, the senior surgeon, was elected his successor by a considerable majority, in opposition to Home, who was, of course, Hunter’s candidate. The acrimony of the contest appears to have led Hunter to announce his intention of no longer dividing with them the fees received for the surgeons’ pupils, owing, as he alleged, to his desire that the other surgeons should pay more attention to their pupils, instead of neglecting them, as he asserted they did. His right to do this was warmly contested, and the question was referred to the subscribers to the hospital. Hunter addressed them a long letter before the day of meeting, in March 1793, detailing the efforts he had made since his connection with the hospital to induce his colleagues to improve the system of instruction, which efforts had proved ineffectual: one man “did not choose to hazard his reputation by giving lectures;” another “did not see where the art could be improved.” Consequently Hunter had slackened his own efforts, causing a great falling off in the numbers of students. The other surgeons replied that they had continued the usual plan, and that if students had neglected their hospital duties to pursue physiological studies, it was not their fault. If they had given lectures, copies of them might have been taken by the pupils and might get abroad. Mr. Hunter’s connection with the Windmill Street Anatomical School, and his power of conferring posts in the army, not his superior attention to his pupils, were the cause of a larger number of pupils entering under him. They were able to show that it would be a manifest disadvantage that only one surgeon should instruct a pupil and not all four. The governors decided against Hunter, for his plan must have produced confusion and discord. A committee drew up rules for the admission and regulation of pupils, and these were adopted without any consultation with Mr. Hunter. One of them, which seemed specially directed against him, forbade the entry of any pupil who had not had previous medical instruction. Young men frequently came up to London from Scotland, recommended to Mr. Hunter, and were entered by him at the hospital without having had any previous medical instruction. A case in point arose in the succeeding autumn. Two young men came up in the usual way, and ignorant of the new rule, Hunter undertook to press for their admission at the next Board meeting, on the 16th October 1793. On the morning of the day he expressed his anxiety to a friend lest some dispute might occur, as he was convinced such an occurrence would be fatal to him. His life, he used to say, “was in the hands of any rascal who chose to annoy and tease him.” Leaving home at the usual hour, he forgot, strange to say, to take his list of appointments with him, and Mr. Clift hastened after him with it. Later, arriving at the hospital, he found the Board already assembled, and presented and supported his memorial. During his speech one of his colleagues flatly contradicted him, and Hunter immediately ceased speaking, retired from the table, and, struggling to suppress his passion, hurried into an adjoining room, which he had scarcely reached when, with a deep groan, he fell lifeless into the arms of Dr. Robertson, one of the hospital physicians. Dr. Baillie his nephew, and Home, who was present, made every effort to restore him, but in vain. Thus were cut short at once the meeting of the St. George’s Board, and the life of the greatest surgeon they had had. He was buried in a simple manner on October 22d, at St Martin’s in the Fields. A post mortem examination had shown that his heart was wasted and diseased, and his coronary arteries, mitral valves, and aorta much ossified and diseased, thus justifying Dr. Jenner’s diagnosis.
In person Hunter was of about middle height, vigorous and robust, with high shoulders and short neck, strongly marked features, projecting eyebrows, light-coloured eyes, and high cheeks. He always dressed plainly, with his hair curled behind; this had been reddish-yellow in early life, but white latterly.
Mr. Hunter left little but his museum, which he wished the nation to purchase and provide for. After years of effort, in the course of which Mr. Pitt, on being appealed to, replied: “What! buy preparations! why, I have not money enough to purchase gunpowder,” Parliament in 1799 voted £15,000 for his museum (it had cost Hunter over £70,000), and its guardianship was offered to the College of Physicians, which declined it, and then to the College of Surgeons, which accepted it, gaining at the same time a new charter and the title of Royal. Hours during which the collection might be open for professional men and others to study, and a keeper to explain the collection, were stipulated for, and at least twenty-four lectures were to be given annually on comparative anatomy and other subjects by members of the college. These are the well-known Hunterian lectures made illustrious by Owen, Huxley, Parker, and Flower. The collection was placed in a temporary habitation in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1806, and Parliament has granted in all £42,500 at various dates for the building of a suitable museum. The present building, however, has cost very much more than the sum mentioned, the expense being defrayed out of the college revenues for diplomas.
During the weary years of waiting for the government consent to purchase the museum, Hunter’s family had to be maintained by the sale of his furniture and library, and his miscellaneous collection of objects of virtu, coats of mail, weapons, &c.; and the mere conservation of the museum was a matter of considerable expense. His papers fell into the hands of Mr., afterwards Sir Everard Home, who detained them without publishing them for many years, during which time he himself published a vast variety of papers under his own name in the Philosophical Transactions. It is generally believed that many of these were largely derived from Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts; and this the more, that, when at last, after many years of evasion, his co-trustees of the museum pressed him to deliver up the manuscripts as they were, he secretly burnt almost the whole of them. In fact, Mr. Clift, who became keeper of the museum, and had been long the assistant and friend of Sir Everard, when questioned by the Commission on Medical Education, replied that all his life he had been employed by Sir Everard in transcribing portions of Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts, and in copying drawings from his portfolios, which Sir Everard issued to the public as his own. It was in 1823, when Sir Everard had received from the printer the final proof of his last volume on Comparative Anatomy, that he disgraced his name for ever by this great and irreparable destruction. Mr. Clift’s list of what he remembers of the burnt papers fills more than a page of the memoir of John Hunter prefixed to vol. x. of Jardine’s Naturalists’ Library. And the bare enumeration and contents would give but little idea of the labour expended in its production. “I have many times,” says Mr. Clift, his assistant and amanuensis during the last twenty months of his life, “written the same page at least half a dozen times over, with corrections and transpositions almost without end,” so great was the difficulty Hunter felt in adequately expressing his ideas. But this only serves to increase our regret that these valuable originals should have been destroyed. He generally wrote his first thoughts or memoranda on all subjects on the slips torn off from the ends, and the blank pages and envelopes of letters. He appeared to have no desire of preserving his own hand-writing, but when they had been copied, usually folded them up, and put them on the chimney-piece to light the candle with; and the rough or waste copies on all subjects, when copied out fair, were taken into his private dissecting-room, as waste paper to dissect upon.
Sir Everard Home[14] describes his brother-in-law as “very warm and impatient, readily provoked, and when irritated, not easily soothed. His disposition was candid and free from reserve, even to a fault. He hated deceit, and was above every kind of artifice; he detested it in others, and too openly avowed his sentiments. In conversation he spoke too freely, and sometimes harshly of his contemporaries; but if he did not do justice to their undoubted merit, it arose not from envy, but from a thorough conviction that surgery was yet in its infancy, and he himself a novice in his own art; and his anxiety to have it carried to perfection made him think meanly and ill of every one whose exertions in this respect did not equal his own.” He was called the Cerberus of the Royal Society, and certainly it appears easier to admire and estimate him correctly now than it would have been to live in comfort with him. Yet, when advanced in practice and honours, he paid more instead of less attention to those whom he had known earlier. Mr. Gough, who had charge of a menagerie in Piccadilly, related that when he called on Mr. Hunter, if the house was full of patients, and carriages waiting at the door, he was always admitted. “You have no time to spare,” said he, “as you live by it. Most of these can wait, as they have little to do when they go home.” It is certain that Hunter only valued money as it enabled him to carry on his researches. He introduces a patient to his brother thus: “He has no money, and you have plenty, so you are well met;” and he would never take fees from curates, authors, and artists. With his lack of courtliness and evident zeal for dissection, it can be no wonder that his income never reached £1000 before 1774. Yet afterwards it increased to £5000 for some years, and had reached to £6000 when he died. But all he could spare, throughout, went to his museum.
Hunter’s sense of his own importance was evident, and often very ingenuously expressed. “Ah, John Hunter, what! still hard at work!” said Dr. Garthshore to him, finding him in the dissecting-room late in life. “Yes, doctor,” replied Hunter, “still hard at work; and you’ll find it difficult to meet with another John Hunter when I am gone.” To Abernethy he said, “I know I am but a pigmy in knowledge, yet I feel as a giant when compared with these men.” He could not be described as a good conversationalist, yet his remarks, slowly brought out, were often wonderfully pointed and forcible. In politics he was a strenuous Tory, and “wished all the rascals who were dissatisfied with their country would be good enough to leave it.” He hated all public ceremony or display, and when begged to go to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s funeral, fairly wished Sir Joshua and his friends at the d--l.
He was undeviatingly honest, eminently a lover of truth, humane and generous in disposition, warm and disinterested as a friend, a kind affectionate husband and father. Some have called him a materialist or even an atheist, but he appears to have had no doubt of the existence of a First Cause. His study of religion was no doubt limited by natural tendencies in his mind, and by his habitual concentration on his work, and the evidence of revelation did not make, so far as can be ascertained, a deep impression on his mind. As to death, his view was, “’tis poor work when it comes to that.”
Hunter’s remains lay undisturbed in St. Martin’s Church, till on March 28, 1859, they were removed, mainly through Mr. Frank Buckland’s intervention, to Abbot Islip’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey and deposited in the north aisle of the nave, close to Ben Jonson’s tomb. His name and achievements are annually commemorated by orations such as those from which the subsequent extracts are made, but most of all by the Hunterian Museum and the lectures delivered in connection therewith.
To expound Hunter’s views of life, and the results of his other philosophical and practical studies, would lead us far beyond our limits. Life he regarded as a principle independent of structure; as a great chemist; as a sort of animal fire. “Mere composition of matter,” he said, “does not give life; for the dead body has all the composition it ever had. Life is a property we do not understand; we can only see the necessary steps leading towards it.” He imagined that life might either be something superadded to matter, or consist in a peculiar arrangement of particles of matter, which being thus disposed acquired the properties of life. As to equivocal generation, he believed—and here he coincides with the best results of modern sciences—that all we could have was negative proofs of its not taking place. As to geological changes, he had strikingly original views, regarding water as the chief agent, and pointing out that the popular view by which the Deluge was supposed to account for finding marine organisms in rocks was untenable. He could discern that in the long past great oscillations of level and climatic variations had taken place. In regard to development and evolution, he had very luminous ideas pointing to modern discoveries. Thus he remarks “if we were to take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage of the most perfect.”
We cannot more clearly emphasise the character of Hunter’s intellect and work than in the words of two distinguished men of our own time, both eminent pathologists, and qualified as few can be for estimating such a man.